HEINRICH (1781-1861):
Andante and Polacca from La Buona Mattina,
part of The Dawning of Music in Kentucky (1820)
Steven Mayer, piano (7:00)

With Louis
Moreau Gottschalk, William Henry Fry, and George Bristow,
Anthony Philip Heinrich was one of four important American
composers for orchestra 150 years ago. Known as (among other
things) the "Beethoven from Kenturky," he was born
in Bohemia in 1781 and self-taught. He first visited the United
States in 1805 and later wound up settling in Philadelphia,
then Pittsburgh (to which he walked, a distance of 300 miles),
then Kentucky (where he initially lived in a log cabin), then
Boston, then New York. In the last city, he was a personage:
teacher, violinist, conductor, feuding critic, enterprising
self-presenter and self-promoter. It may be doubted whether
any New York orchestra was adequately prepared for the Heinrich
opuses assayed under the composer's baton. Heinrich's orchestral
scores employ up to 44 individual parts, often moving at exceptional
speeds. Eschewing development and formalized structure, they
eagerly scramble and recycle seeming scraps of Haydn and Beethoven.
Their means of organization and continuity signify bold invention
or bold incompetence. This boldness is at all times impressive.
Time has not tamed Father Heinrich.

William
Henry Fry was the first music critic for a major American
daily newspaper: Horace Greeley's influential New York Tribune.
In this capacity, he fulminated over the neglect of contemporary
American composers, especially himself. Fry the composer did
not lack popularity and acclaim. But his taste of success,
and travels abroad, heightened his infuriated awareness that
the United States lacked the means to school, present, and
promote its own creative musical talent. "I make common
cause with Americans, born or naturalized, who are engaged
in the world's Art struggle and against degrading deference
to European dictation," he trumpeted. What does Fry's
music sound like? His opera Leonora, produced in Philadelphia
and New York, is Italian bel canto. But neither does Fry disdain
German and French influences. In his Macbeth Overture
a recurrent theme in trombones and tuba precisely insinuates
"Double, double toil and trouble/Fire burn and cauldron
bubble." Elsewhere, the orchestra mimics "All hail
Macbeth!" and - at the close - "Long live King Malcolm!"
The catchy tunes and narrative fire, however innocent, are
contagious. Granted, the piece suffers by comparison with
Verdi, an obvious model. But there are other contexts for
judgment. As another critic wrote of another Fry opus, his
music "demands our attention for more reasons than one.
It is American; it is home-made and therefore entitled to
fair hearing and to lenient judgment." What is more,
Fry was writing for prebellum New York -- for a polyglot music
crowd itching to have fun.

Louis
Moreau Gottschalk is far the most famous and accomplished
of the mid-century Americans and the most audibly a product
of the New World. Raised on saucy Caribbean delicacies, he
flouts Europe not primitively and aggressively, like Fry or
Heinrich, but with sublime insouciance and practiced finesse.
This is because he was in part a cultivated European. He was
born in New Orleans, a city semi-French, semi-Spanish, semi-American,
with a thriving operatic culture. From the age of thirteen
he studied in Paris, where he became a successful pianist/composer
whose admirers included Berlioz and Hugo. He arrived in New
York in 1863. He later took off for Havana and points south.
Gottschalk's piano works - he wrote more than one hundred,
all in short forms - profitably belong to an era when distinctions
between art and entertainment remained blurred. Worldly yet
unself-conscious, they combine a Chopinesque command of the
pearly Romantic keyboard with a easy access to the pungent
vernacular strains he encountered on New Orleans streets,
in South American dance halls and North American music halls.
What other American has produced a virtuoso etude as original
and enduring as The Banjo, whose rapid-fire strumming
intimates Stephen Foster's "Camptown Races" in a
whirlwind of pulsating, strobe-lit color?

The two-movement
"Romantic symphony" Night in the Tropics,
composed for a monster orchestra including the latest valved
brass, and Afro-Cuban drums and maracas, testifies to Gottschalk's
flair for gargantuan spectacle, as well as a nascent gift
for the larger forms. The climactic, roof-raising fiesta criolla
is cunningly paced and varied; there is even a comically incongruous
fugal episode. This is top-drawer American repertoire, virtually
unplayed by American orchestras.

George
Whitefield Chadwick was the leader among equals of the New
England composers of his generation - more than any such composers'
aggregation before or since, a genuine American school of
shared interests, enthusiasms, and accomplishments. He studied
in Leipzig and Munich. Arthur Foote studied with the Berlin-educated
John Knowles Paine. Horatio Parker studied with Chadwick,
then in Munich. Amy Beach was the youngest of the "Boston
boys," in whose company she was explicitly accepted by
Chadwick even though her gender prevented her from attending
the boys' frequent gatherings at the St. Botolph Club and
Gavern Club. Beach and Chadwick are the Second New England
School composers who most matter today - the former because
she most vividly gauges the costs of Brahmin self-confinement,
the latter because in the history of American classical music
he is the first symphonic composer to fashion a recognizably
American style.

Boston
embraced Amy Cheney. Her Boston Symphony Orchestra debut,
playing Chopin's F minor Piano Concerto at the age of seventeen,
was a triumph. When, as the twenty-seven-year-old Mrs. H.
H. A. Beach, she completed her Gaelic Symphony, the
Boston Symphony premiered it to demonstrative public and journalistic
acclaim. The thirty-five minute, four-movement C-sharp minor
Piano Concerto came next. In this long and tempestuous work,
the soloist - Beach herself - is hero, by turns contemplative
and explosive. Her confrontational posture and savvy capacity
for display are qualities utterly uncharacteristic of a Foote,
Parker, or Chadwick. Notwithstanding an abundance of borrowed
gestures, the concerto is not lacking in originality. It deserves
a caliber of advocacy - a famous pianist influentially to
champion its highest possibilities - it has yet to enjoy.

If Beach
never managed to achieve a fully distinctive stylistic signature,
Chadwick possesses a recognizable voice steeped in the vernacular
of cracker-barrel humor, fiddle tunes, and minstrel songs.
This affinity - often incidental, sometimes suppressed --
was at at least occasionally conscious; in his memoirs he
wrote that he was "determined to make" his Symphonic
Sketches "American in style - as [he] understood
the term." Jubilee, the first of the four Sketches,
deserves to be an American staple. Its Yankee exuberance and
heartwarming nostalgia are iconic of Mark Twain's America.
A horn flourish nearly quotes Stephen Foster's "Camptown
Races." The gorgeous second subject, coming next, begs
for an Oscar Hammerstein lyric. The materials are vividly
colored and recolored throughout. The coda's poetic glow is
the sunset toward which movie cowboys would canter in decades
to come.

As of
1900, the most eminent American concert composer was Edward
MacDowell. He began his musical studies in New York. At the
age of fifteen he was taken to Europe. He eventually settled
in Germany, to work with distinguished teachers, to be encouraged
by Liszt, and to make his reputation. As with Gottschalk,
his fame preceded him upon his return to the United States.
In 1903, with his creative years behind him, he revealingly
confided that the Dirge, from his Indian Suite, was
what pleased him most "of all my music." An American
variant on Siegfried's Funeral Music, from Wagner's Gotterdammerung,
it abandons this composer's typical melodrama and nostalgia
to seek profundity, and tenuously rises toward the "world-sorrow"
he here aspired to express.

MacDowell's
limitations are set in sharp relief by a contemporaneous American
who more fully inhabits the Wagner/Liszt mode, who commands
something like their heights and depths of erotic/demonic
abandon and mystical /religious ecstasy: MacDowell's friend
George Templeton Strong. Strong's fifty-minute Sintram
Symphony, inspired by Durer's phantasmagoric "Knight,
Death and the Devil," steaming with Tristan and
Parsifal and Bruckner, is formidably and precariously
epochal; its breadth of stride cannot be found among MacDowell
and his other Boston and New York colleagues. The work enjoyed
a highly successful premiere in New York in 1892 and was,
like its composer, subsequently forgotten. In Switzerland,
where Strong eventually settled, the Sintram symphony
was conducted by Ernest Ansermet in 1912 and 1932. Here is
yet another American overdue for revival and exploration.

What Willa
Cather, describing the impact of Dvorak's New World
Symphony in her novel The Song of the Lark (1915),
called "the immeasurable yearning of all flat lands"
is embodied in the clean sonority and uncluttered, unadorned
musical space of Dvorak's American style. The little-known
American Suite, begun in New York just after the premiere
of the New World Symphony, is a case in point. Dvorak
wrote it for solo piano, then lovingly orchestrated it in
1895. Simplicity - its serene speech, shunning compositional
virtuosity - is its crux. This, Dvorak's method, is also his
intended message. The third movement is a jaunty dance not
far removed from the world of stride piano. The fourth evokes
the vacant Iowa landscape of which he found "sometimes
very sad, sad to despair." In Spillville, Iowa, Dvorak
had listened to interracial Kickapoo Medicine Show musicians,
including two African-Americans who intermingled Native American
dances with banjo and guitar. In the American Suite,
prairie vacancy mates with cakewalk, and - in the fifth and
final movement - an A minor "Indian" tune turns
into an A major minstrel song.

In Dvorak's
Humoresques, composed in Prague in between stints in
Manhattan, the composer's American and Bohemian styles are
sometimes juxtaposed cheek by jowl. The Fourth Humoresque
begins with a seeming snatch of Porgy and Bess - composed
by George Gershwin four decades later. If the Fourth Humoresque
is obscure, the Seventh hums a dance tune so familiar in the
United States that many Americans doubtless assume an American
composed it.

The Indianist
movement in American music, largely inspired by Dvorak, was
spearheaded by the fascinating and insufficiently remembered
composer/journalist Arthur Farwell. Though the Indianists
are today vaguely recalled (if at all) are naïve and
culturally exploitative, Farwell was no naif. He viewed Native
American chant as one part of a varied tapestry of Americana.
His lifelong reverence for the Native American - which began
in childhood, when he lived for a time in a Native American
village on Lake Superior - was an honorable, if Romanticized,
product of his time. As a pioneering publisher of American
composers, he abhorred sentimentality "like poison"
and if it cannot be said that all his own music transcends
kitsch, his best works deserve to be perpetuated as superior
early efforts to create a singular American concert style.
Pawnee Horses (1905), barely a minute long, is based on
an Omaha song Farwell considered so complex in its rhythms
that it could not be performed by "any known singer except
an Indian." With its dissonance and rhythmic bite (remarkably
progressive for 1904), the Navajo War Dance No. 2 -
dedicated to John Kirkpatrick (later to champion Ives' Concord
Sonata), who held it in high regard - suggests something
like a New World Bartok. Farwell's eight-part a cappella version
of Pawnee Horses - music not yet commercially recorded
-- unforgettably elaborates the earlier piano work.

To a degree
uncanny and extreme, the preserved memories of father and
childhood anchored Charles Ives's creative identity - as did
his surrogate Transcendentalist fathers Emerson and Thoreau.
In Ives' essay "Thoreau" the writer sits "rapt
in reverie, amidst goldenrod, sandcherry and sumac."
The restless eagerness of an early morning tramp gradually
slows toward "the tempo of Nature"; a buoyant, too
personal introspection gives way to harmonious solitude. Ives'
indelible musical rendering of misted water, cloud and dew,
of "drifting meadows of the air" is both physical
and metaphysical. Tolling octaves in the bass evoke "the
faint sound of the Concord bell....At a distance over the
woods the sounds acquire a certain vibratory hum as if the
pine needles in the horizon were the strings of a harp which
it swept....A vibration of the universal lyre." An innate
music merges with nature and with the idea of nature.

9.

LOEFFLER
(1861-1935):
Le Saint Jour de Paques (Easter Sunday) from Music
for Four Stringed Instruments (1917)

America's
most accomplished aestheticist composer, Charles Martin Loeffler
was court musician to Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner. Though
he claimed to have been born in Alsace, recent scholarship
suggests that his actual birthplace was Berlin. Though wondrously
deracinated - his English was German-accented; he lived as
a child in Hungary and Russia - his orientation was predominantly
French. Plainsong is also a strong influence on his exotic
style. Music for Four Stringed Instruments, infused
with Gregorian chant, composed in memory of a friend's son
killed in combat, is both an elegy and hymn. Loeffler was
the one fin-de-siecle Boston composer whose national reputation
survived World War I; he remained highly esteemed through
the 1930s.

Born in
Elmira, New York, Charles Tomlinson Griffes studied in Berlin
and returned to the United States in 1907 a highly competent
composer of German-style songs in German. The French Impressionists
and Scriabin greatly influenced such subsequent compositions
as The Pleasure-Dome of Kubla Khan. Griffes also composed
in "Japanese" style, with nondirectional harmonies
and delicately tinted instrumental effects. Late in his brief
thirteen-year composing career, he repudiated "the reputation
of an orientalist and nothing more" and forged a mature
idiom combining exotic fragrance and sensuality with primal
sinew. This new side of Griffes - engaged, visceral -- is
sealed by his Piano Sonata, a taught, tightly organized exercise
in New World diablerie, in three linked movements. If the
hallucinatory frenzy of this music evokes Scriabin, its savagery
is American. Though a white-hot 1950s recording by William
Masselos should have made it an American staple, it remains
little performed.

The Piano
Variations of Aaron Copland were a bracing wake-up call, a
new American sound for New World modernists coming of age
after World-War I . The angular rhythms and dissonant tonal
shards vibrate with the intensity and nervous energy of Copland's
New York. Versus the warm American roots exhumed by Dvorak,
and the familiar Germanic models he applied, this is skyscraper
music of steel and concrete. No previous American had achieved
such concise freshness of style.

12.

HARRIS:
Symphony No. 3 (1937)

Marin Alsop conducting the Colorado Symphony Orchestra

If any
American composer of the interwar decades rivaled Copland
in the public imagination it was Roy Harris: a "genuine
American," born on Lincoln's birthday in a log cabin
in Oklahoma. Then as now, Harri's one-movement Third Symphony
proved his signature achievement. The magnificent beginning
suggests that he has, like some musical deus ex machina, swooped
down from on high to mediate an even exchange between Old
World traditions and New World wilderness adventure. A loping,
striding cello song probes the surrounding silence. The long
lines of this melody, the irregular phrases seamlessly bound,
the spacious textures and open fourths and fifths suggest
an American plainchant (pun and all). The Third Symphony's
pioneer trek next discovers a pastorale: cowboy and honky-tonk
snatches wafted above shimmering strings. Then comes a rugged
fugue not according to the book. Harris wrestles with a curt,
thrusting theme: he thwacks it, turns it upside down, sets
it astride galloping strings.

The European
composer who most sensationally infiltrated American classical
music after World War I was a marauding wild man: Edgard Varese,
a father figure for those who sought radical direction. Reviewing
Integrales as performed by Leopold Stokowski in 1925,
the critic Paul Rosenfeld - an influential arbiter of the
musically new -- claimed its composer for the New World: "he
has come into relationship with elements of American life,
and found corresponding rhythms within himself set free."
Typical of Varese is the absence of strings, of tonal harmony,
of thematic development. Ferruccio Busoni, with whom Varese
had studied in Berlin, pertinently espoused an "absolute
music" without boundaries or divisions. By 1930, Varese
had emerged as a leading figure among America's "ultra-modern"
composers, a group also prominently including Henry Cowell
and Carl Ruggles.

With the
advent of radio and recordings, the postwar decades produced
popular music as we know it, and with it the central achievement
of American music in the first half of the twentieth century:
jazz. Its most ardent supporters included Europe's leading
composers. Its most threatening manifestation, for Copland
and other Americans that the Europeans routinely ignored,
was the composer whose concert works most popularly and completely
joined Carnegie Hall to Harlem, and who succeeded in Hollywood
and even on Broadway. George Gershwin was a self-made millionaire,
maddeningly endowed with a supreme ego the more daunting for
its immunity to pettiness or jealousy, whose Rhapsody in
Blue, Piano Concerto in F, and An American in Paris
galvanized a broader American public than the concert output
of any previous American. In the last-named of these works,
the narrative structure - adventures of a cheeky tourist/composer
- shrewdly rationalizes the song-medley form, and the culminating
song-stew cleverly combines many tuneful ingredients.

Claimant
to the combined aspirations of Copland, Gershwin, and Koussevitzky,
Leonard Bernstein created a landmark Broadway musical in which
elements of opera powerfully intermingled. His crowning compositional
achievement, marrying high and low, West Side Story
appeared only months after he had proclaimed Americans "in
a historical position now similar to that of the popular musical
theater in Germany" just before Mozart took the Singspiel
and elevated it to a work of art. "And this event
can happen any second. It's almost as though it is our moment
in history."

In the
late twentieth century, American classical music was refreshed
by a reductionist antidote to modernist complexity. A new
aesthetic, "minimalism," created musical structure
through repetition. The steady pulse, simple harmonies, and
electronic instruments of American popular music were potent
influences, as were such non-Western genres as Indonesian
gamelan and Indian raga. The result was a music of stasis,
quiescently hovering or racing in place. Philip Glass - who
consciously charted a radical break with 12-tone composers
of "crazy creepy music"; who studied with Ravi Shankar,
traveled in Morocco and India, and practiced Tibetan Buddhism
- called it "intentionless" music, in contradistinction
to tension-and-release Western trajectories. In his moody
Violin Concerto, the soloist runs a minimalist obstacle course.
Glass's connectedness with a mass of listeners was something
new in American concert music since Bernstein's Candide
Overture and West Side Story Dances. As significant,
he is a player: not since Bernstein has so popular a concert
composer been so popular a performer.